What I learned from others' shell scripts

Re:What I learned from others' shell scripts by essrinn on Wednesday August 14, 2013 @04:05AM (#6210390)

Shell scripts frequently fail to handle directory names with spaces in them. Example from the linked article: APP_ROOT=`dirname $0`

This is not going to do what you expect if the current script is run via a command with spaces in one of the preceding directories' name.

It should be: APP_ROOT="`dirname "$0"`"

Even this would fail if your immediate parent directory's name ended with a newline character, but should handle any other whitespace without issue.

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Re:What I learned from others' shell scripts by damncabbage on Wednesday August 14, 2013 @04:40AM (#6210480)

The outer quotes aren't required:

  APP_ROOT=`dirname "$0"`

(See http://www.tldp.org/LDP/abs/html/varassignment.html#EX16)

Also, even if ^J or ^M were present in a parent directory's name, the command above would still work. Whitespace-like characters take some getting used to with Bash.

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